n3wjack's spurts of the mind and other geeky ramblings

how to secure your wordpress blog

WordPress is popular and as it goes with all kinds of popular software, it becomes a target for hackers trying to take over and use your site to send spam into the world, or just cause some other kind of mayhem.

To protect yourself from this kind of trouble, there are a few things you can do to prevent bad things from happening to your precious WordPress site.

First of all, keep your WP software up-to-date. There are usually some security fixes in there and you do want to have those live on your public facing site. Hackers know what the vulnerabilities are in old WP versions and scan the internet automatically for unpatched sites. Don’t become an easy target by not having the latest version of WP installed. The latest version of WP (v3.7.1) is able to do security updates itself which is awesome. Be sure to check if your site supports this and activate it if it does.

Keep your plugins up-to-date as well for the very same reason. Old plugins can offer a way in for hackers and we don’t want that to happen.

Delete (old) pluginsyou don’t use anymore, or replace them with newer ones. JetPack has a lot on board out of the box now so you can probably ditch a few old plugins. The less plugins you have, the less possible vulnerabilities your site has.

Take regular backups. In case something goes wrong, you can at least restore a version you know isn’t compromised.

Use a long, hard to guess and preferably random password for your admin account. Using a different admin user is also a good idea. Brute force login attempts are made against the default “admin” user, so if that one has a long random password you’re pretty safe there. You can use something easier to remember for an alternative admin account if you want, but I recommend you to use something like KeePass to manage long & unguessable passwords anyway.

Here are some plugins that can help with these tips:

WordFence scans your site for possible vulnerabilities by checking your installed WP and plugin files with the ones from the official releases. It also helps with the first 2 tips by warning you by email if a plugin or WP itself needs an update. Quite handy.

WP security audit log won’t prevent anything, but it keeps track of logins, updates of plugins etc, so that if something weird happens, you can use it to figure out the “when” and “what”.

A backup plugin. There are plenty and you should pick one that fits your needs. I’ve used BackUpWordPress for a DB backup only, but it can also backup the files. It sends you an email with either the zipped backup or a link to download it if it’s too big to stuff in the email. Another good option is UpdraftPlus which can backup your files & DB to remote storage like Google Drive or Dropbox a.o. Your hoster might also have a full backup feature, which is usually the best option anyway as it will backup more than just your WP site.

BruteProtect protects (as it says) against brute force login attempts, a problem a lot of WP blogs had to deal with lately. Next to that you should of course make sure you have a complex password for your admin account.

Bad Behavior is mainly a tool to combat spam, but since it scans for incoming malicious requests it can also block the occasional bot looking for vulnerable sites.

For a more extensive guide to securing your WordPress site, also check out this Bloggers Guide to WordPress Security. It’s long and full of great tips and guides covering a wide rang of security practices like how to combat spam, CAPTCHA’s and setting up HTTPS.

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1 thought on “how to secure your wordpress blog”

It’s baffling to me that brute force prevention isn’t built into WordPress by default! This is a good list of best practices. Some of my friends and I recently built a plugin called Stream, which is similar to the audit log but categorizes all activity so it can be filtered/searched later pretty easily. When I first installed the plugin on my site I was amazed how many “failed login attempts” were happening, like 100 per day! It prompted me to immediately install the Limit Login Attempts plugin. It’s amazing what you learn when you can properly track WP Admin activity.